


embrace an empty space

by fideliant



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-17
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2018-03-18 06:19:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3559271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fideliant/pseuds/fideliant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What a funny word to use, Eggsy thinks. <i>Loss,</i> like Harry’s not dead, like he’s still waiting to be found.</p>
            </blockquote>





	embrace an empty space

_Darling, all night I try to cease on a reason for this mad, mad season_  
_The nights, they are so long, I can't remember being in light_  
_Call it sleep, call it death, call it what you like_  
_But only sleep, only sleep brings you back to life_

_— Slowly Goes The Night_ , Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

 

***

 

The night they move into the new house, Eggsy goes to Harry’s. He takes the bus in his suit and sits in the back with his arms folded and his umbrella in his lap and he stares out the window the whole way there.

It happens in the movies. This is what he tells himself.

The street is dark when he arrives, the porch light switched off. A sodden newspaper lies on the welcome mat. Eggsy knocks twice and stands on the front step, shivering in the cold. Five minutes later, hand clenched over the brass knocker, he tries again.

But there is no answer.

 

***

 

He is _Galahad_ , by the end of the week.

“Welcome to Kingsman,” Merlin says, and Eggsy smiles without looking at him.

“Thanks, Merlin.

“He’d be proud of you, Eggsy.”

Seems like everyone’s favourite thing to say to him, these days. They don’t even mention his name anymore. He wonders why that is until he realises he can’t even say it himself.

“I know,” he says instead, even though he doesn’t, and wrings his hands tighter behind his back in parade rest to stop them from shaking.

 

***

 

They have the funeral a week after.

It’s a small and private affair, a luxury for the sheer amount of dead to be dealt with in the aftermath of V-day. The casket is closed, and Eggsy is grateful for that. He wants to remember Harry as he was the last time he saw him, handsome and whole, without a bullet hole in his face.

Before the service, Merlin asks him to say a few words. Eggsy isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say. He didn’t know Harry all that well, nor for very long, but he still takes the podium when it’s his turn and talks about the man who’d singlehandedly turned his life around. He talks about the greatness of the mentor he knew and how he wishes he could’ve had the chance to repay him, and his voice is steady throughout.

Afterwards, people he’s never met before in his life come up to him and shake his hand and offer condolences, _I’m sorry for your loss_. What a funny word to use, Eggsy thinks. _Loss_ , like Harry’s not dead, like he’s still waiting to be found. He thanks them anyway, because it would be uncharitable not to do so.

There is an announcement in the papers the next day. Eggsy knows because he checks.

 

***

 

Eggsy keeps Harry’s number on his phone even though he doesn’t know what he intends to do with it. Silly, pointless little things, possibly. Like calling it, or texting and hoping for a reply. It’s stupid and he knows it’s stupid, which is why he doesn’t go any further than lying on his bed with his phone held above him and his thumb hovering over the little numbers on the screen.

 

_Are you sure you wish to delete this contact?_

 

A long while passes before Eggsy realises he’s been just staring, not doing anything at all. The clock on the wall ticks to half-past midnight. He has a briefing to attend at eight in the morning and needs to be up by seven.

 

_Harry Hart has been deleted from your contacts_

 

He puts his phone on his bedside table and flicks the lights off and pulls the blanket over his head. He turns over, closing his eyes against his pillow, and tries to go to sleep as quickly as he can.

Not a minute later, he has his phone again and is slowly typing the number back into his address book under his covers. Saves it as _Hart, Harry_ , right above _Home_ , and falls asleep with it clutched to his chest.

 

***

 

His dreams are one of only two things, now:

1\. Harry comes back. He comes back and Eggsy will be too busy with holding him to think about punching the living daylights out of him. Harry will say his name and Eggsy says his back, and forgiveness will come to them both easily, like it always has.

Or,

2\. He’s standing in a church courtyard watching Valentine hold a gun against Harry’s head, and Eggsy tries to scream for it to stop but his words only make it through after Valentine has pulled the trigger, and he’s still screaming when the gun is turned on him.

Either way, the end point is the same. He wakes in a cold panic with his eyes burning and his chest full of splinters, and his fingers remain clutched around empty sheets long after the sensation has faded.

 

***

 

He throws himself into missions because he has to. Any mission, anywhere at all. He takes whatever Merlin is willing to offer for the time being, which isn’t very much, but it’s enough. Retrieving a cache of blood diamonds in Guatemala. Dismantling a terrorist cell in Bulgaria. A shootout on the rooftop of a speeding Kyoto train. When he returns and asks for a fourth, Merlin flips the completed mission dossier shut and tents his fingers and looks up at Eggsy.

“I think you’ve gone on one too many, don’t you?” he asks.

Eggsy shakes his head. “What’s next?”

“I don’t think —”

“There’s the Portugal assignment, isn’t there? I want in.”

“I’ve assigned that to Lancelot, but listen to me for a second —”

“Backup, then,” Eggsy says. “I’ll watch Roxy’s back, Roxy can watch mine. We’ll get it done in half the time together.”

“She’ll be fine on her own. I don’t need another agent out there.”

“Something else, then,” Eggsy says, his voice rising. “Anything you have. Send me to bloody Antarctica, I don’t care.”

“Galahad.”

“Just give me a fucking mission, you wanker!” Eggsy yells, hands clenched into fists, before he remembers himself. He swallows and stamps down on his anger as Merlin narrows his eyes. “I — I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to — I wasn’t. Sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Merlin says, but his heavy gaze doesn’t lift. “Look, Galahad — Eggsy. Everyone’s worried about you. He wouldn’t want you acting like this, you know that.”

_He_ , again. It’s enough to make him feel sick. Eggsy blinks at his shoes and sucks a breath in and brings his eyes up to meet Merlin’s.

“Just one more,” he says. “Please.”

Merlin watches him for a while longer, then sighs and pulls another folder out from his desk drawer.

 

***

 

He spends three days in Argentina before things go terribly wrong.

Day four, and Eggsy’s in a warehouse, smack dab in the midst of a firefight he knows he cannot win. There are two dozen men firing on him, their bullets deflecting off his open umbrella as he lets off shotgun blast after shotgun blast. Two men crumple where they stand. A third drops his rifle and stumbles back screaming with his right arm in tatters. The remaining twenty-one hostiles continue firing, and Eggsy ducks behind a large stack of steel cylinders as his umbrella’s shield integrity drops to nine percent.

“That’s enough, Galahad,” Merlin says over the intercom. “You have the asset, get yourself out of there.”

“Not yet!” Eggsy yells, twisting around the corner of his cover spot and spending another shotgun cartridge that hits another man in the face. Four percent, and he checks his available ammunition to find just two rounds remaining.

“Don’t be a goddamn hero, retreat now!” Merlin shouts. “Use a smokescreen and run, you idiot!”

Bullets continue to pepper the dusty wooden floor. They’re beginning to surround him, Eggsy’s aware. Very soon, there will be no way out of this, even under the cover of smoke. He pulls himself up the cylinders to acquire a new angle and takes out two men with a scatter shot, but his last round goes wide and the first holes begin to appear in the toughened material of his umbrella.

“Galahad, you are to retreat now!” Merlin repeats furiously. “This is an order!”

“No, I can do this!” Eggsy lies, closing his umbrella and unholstering his guns.

“You fucking —”

A bullet strikes the side of Eggsy’s glasses, knocking them off his face and cutting a bloody line into his cheek. He reels, footing lost, and falls backwards to the floor. For a few seconds, he is too stunned to move, but the sound of gunfire rattles closer to him and Eggsy scans about for his glasses, which he finds in two pieces a few feet from him.

“Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ,” Eggsy gasps as he tests the comms link, but they’re pretty broken. It’s a lost cause; he gets nothing, not even static.

He’s hit twice then, once in the back and once in the thigh, and while his suit holds together the impact knocks him to the dirt again. There, he rolls over and returns fire before jumping back up and finally running for it, but there are now no less than three men at every exit and the rest are closing in around him, and there’s only so many places left for him to hide.

Five minutes and hundreds of rounds later, four more men are dead and Eggsy’s cowering behind a broken forklift, his gun clips empty and umbrella on the other side of the warehouse. There are people shouting in Spanish, their voices edging precariously close to his location. _I am going to die_ , he realises just as he sees the metal canister flying through the air, and the world explodes into a tinny shrilling and blinding light around him.

The next thing he knows is someone’s strong arms around his torso, dragging him away, and muffled rifle fire in his ringing ears as he blinks, and blinks, as the blurry figure above him mouths soundless words down at him.

_Harry_ , Eggsy thinks, and his heart hammers like thunder in his chest because this is it, he knew this would happen if he waited long enough. He knew that Harry would come for him.

He always knew.

 

***

 

When Eggsy’s senses have returned, the warehouse is burning in the distance and Merlin is sitting next to him, a smoking Carbine in his lap and a belt of stun grenades slung over his shoulder. He doesn’t even so much as look at Eggsy as he rips a pressure dressing from its packaging and wads it against the bloody patch over his thigh.

“One month,” he growls, “Off-duty,” and Eggsy doesn’t have it in him to argue back.

 

***

 

London is cold and wet and bleak. Without the missions, he has nothing to do with himself. He cleans the house, takes long showers, and throws out the last of the moving boxes. He wanders through the city for hours and buys discount books that sit on his shelf unread. DVDs he wouldn’t watch in a million years and CDs of music he doesn’t like pile up on his table and sometimes he just sits on his bed and stares at them. Seems appropriate, for all the mess his life has come to at the moment.

His mum likes that he’s home all the time now. She works at a bakery in Soho and brings back different cakes and pastries every day, and insists on making Eggsy tea to go along with them. They have different kinds — fruit-scented ones, Darjeelings, lapsang souchong, chamomile — but all Eggsy can think about is how he never asked Harry what his favourite flavour of tea was, or ice-cream, if he even liked tea or ice-cream, or any other detail of his life for how much the man knew of his.

It doesn’t feel fair, but then again, it never has been.

 

***

 

There’s the medal. Eggsy can’t believe he forgot about that.

The number engraved on the back is cold to the touch, but he imagines it singes his skin all the same as he runs a finger over the metal. Phone in hand, he enters the number and presses the call button and listens to the ringing, wondering what he hopes for. Maybe he still has a favour remaining that he doesn’t know about. Maybe there’s a chance that if he does this, somehow, Harry will have no choice but to come back to him.

“Customer complaint, how may I assist you?” the familiar cool female voice greets.

“Oxfords, not brogues,” Eggsy whispers immediately. He holds his phone closer against his ear, straining to hear what has to follow.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman replies smoothly, without even a beat of hesitation. “You must have the wrong number. Goodbye.”

The line goes dead with a click. Eggsy grips his phone so tight his knuckles go white around it. When he calls the number again, it’s been disconnected.

 

***

 

He takes the monorail to the mansion and goes down to the firing range and empties three clips worth of bullets into a single target until the ragged hole in the heart box could fit a hand clenched into a fist.

 

***

 

He wonders, if Harry was alive, how long he would make Eggsy wait before letting him know.

He wonders how long that would have to be before he hated Harry more than he loved him.

 

***

 

It’s surprisingly easy to break into the house of a spy. Any half-decent traceur with a brain and an Oyster card would be able to manage it, honestly.

Eggsy lifts the latch on the balcony door and lets himself into the study. Everything is just as it was the last time he’d been there, less Harry’s laptop. Property of Kingsman, of course. They’d probably swept the house and removed anything remotely of importance. Eggsy crosses the room to the liquor cabinet and picks up the bottle of Vermouth on the top rack. He rotates it in his hands, studying the amber liquid within and reading the label. It’s unmistakably the same one Harry used to teach him how to make a martini. He puts it back and moves on.

Harry’s bedroom is next door. There’s his bed, which Harry had insisted Eggsy took the day they spent in each other’s company, the day that wasn’t anywhere near enough. He smooths his hands over the silk sheets, remembers being clad in them and thinking about Harry sleeping two doors away. Remembers getting up and padding quietly into the hallway and standing outside the spare bedroom with his hand on the doorknob, willing himself to turn it. He won’t imagine how different things would be now if he’d been less of a coward that night, or what Harry would have said.

The pillows still smell like him. Eggsy lifts one of them to his face, presses his nose into it and _inhales_ as though he hasn’t breathed all day. In that moment, he finds himself missing Harry more than he can begin to bear, gasps his hurt against the fabric tickling his cheek, and this is all it takes for him to finally, finally fall apart.

 

***

 

A week before his probation ends, Merlin suggests a therapist. Eggsy suggests something else Merlin can do with that idea, or where he can put it, rather.

His days get better, as slow as they go. He signs up for a class in ikebana because it seems like something Harry would approve of. Learning to speak the language of flowers, can't get any more gentlemanly than that.

In the evenings, he goes on jogs that take him from one end of the city to the other and leaves his lungs aching from the chilly air. Other times, he walks J.B to Brompton Cemetery, where Harry’s grave stands among hundreds.

He brings him lilies.

 

***

 

It’s a freezing winter morning when Merlin slides a folder over his table at him and says with a smirk, “A change in weather might do you some good. How does Mombasa sound to you?”

Eggsy thumbs through the documents, skimming the objectives without really taking them in. He shuts the folder and asks, “When can I start?”

 

***

 

The hotel he checks into is one of those seaside sorts, with a view that Eggsy would find stunning if it weren’t for the assassination he’s trying to foil. He unpacks only what he needs and checks that his gun is fully loaded before heading out into the city to get his bearings.

He’s been walking around the shopping district for an hour before he picks up on the fact that he’s being followed. A shadow of a person at the corner of his eye, lurking behind parked cars and vendor stands but never once straying further than a hundred metres from him. Eggsy gives it another ten minutes to be sure, then peels away from the crowd to duck into an empty skip, drawing his gun as he does so and screwing a silencer onto the barrel. Then, he swiftly scales the wire fence and doubles round the back of the building, runs along its length, and watches from the street corner as his pursuer enters the skip.

Eggsy follows them in, takes aim at their back and says, “Hands up. Make any funny moves and I’ll fucking kill you where you stand.”

The person, a man, goes stock-still, but he keeps his hands by his sides.

“I said, put your hands up,” Eggsy repeats, taking a cautious step forward. He keeps his eyes fixed on the man’s hands. If he sees a finger move, even the slightest twitch, he’ll fire.

The man neither responds nor obeys. His head tilts back slightly and his shoulders move with a breath in, then out.

Two steps more, and Eggsy’s trigger finger is now fully online. “I’m not asking a third time,” he warns, and means it.

“Eggsy,” the man finally says, sounding weary, sounding too sad, and turns just so that the side of his face is visible.

Eggsy’s mouth goes dry.

He drops the gun.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying out a new writing style, so if you please, let me know what you think here or on [Tumblr](http://fideliant.tumblr.com)!


End file.
